Upper Echelons Give Life To Lower Order Of White Racists

June 17, 1996|DERRICK Z. JACKSON and The Boston Globe

It is irrelevant whether or not the arson attacks on African-American churches are a racist plot that is easy for white people to condemn and wash their hands of. The fire will not be out until white Americans end the conspiracy of silence that gave the criminals the license to reach for the match.

The count of charred churches went from 5 to 10 to 20 with no general alarm. There was so little knowledge about the fires that Reggie White, the star football player and reverend, thought the victimizing of his church in Tennessee last winter was an isolated incident. Even the two most recent burnings in Greenville, Texas, were described mundanely by fire chief Robert Wood as "acts of local vandalism."

Local by act, national in spirit. President Clinton called them "dehumanizing."Attorney General Janet Reno, said, "The entire administration is committed to putting an end to these fires," now numbering more than 30 in 18 months.

The fact is, too many white people have collectively been more tinder than fire brigade. They have lived with the illusion for two decades that you can attack affirmative action and voting rights without any violent after-effects. From bellicose blue-collar workers to cold-hearted academics to stereotyping news editors, white Americans have concocted fantasies of an African-America so powerful that 58 percent of white people last year told a Washington Post/-Kaiser Foundation/Harvard University survey of 1,970 people that the average African-American has a better job than the average white person.

The fantasy means that white people treat black children like dogs in public education and the criminal justice system exalts individuals such as Colin Powell, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan and Oprah Winfrey as if we have overcome. It means making Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson and Afrocentric professors infamous bigots by their words while white skinheads, white soldiers and white cops, almost none of whom you can name, actually do the violent deeds. It means President Clinton asking us to be sensitive to the pain of white males even as they continue to dominate upper management, maintain glass ceilings for white women and draw down steel curtains on black folks.

It means white people act as if the harsh reality of black life in the US does not exist. Once you set up this fantasy, some white people take it too far. W.J. Cash, in his 1941 book "The Mind of the South," wrote that the Ku Klux Klan "was made up of the common whites, industrial and rural. But its blood ... came from the upper orders."In 1996, we have arrested 13and 14-year-old white girls and boys as burning suspects, but the blood was Reagan's state's rights, Bush's Willie Horton, Buchanan's paranoia of white extinction, Limbaugh's mockeries of black heroes, Gingrich's social-service cuts and Wilson's dismemberment of affirmative action at the University of California at Berkeley.

The blood is also the capitulation of white liberals and moderates to the excessive focus on the moral failures and alleged pathologies of African-Americans, with no discussion about the failure of white people as white people. Clinton has made several speeches against bad behavior in front of African-American audiences. No white politician has gone into the belly of white resentment to denounce it as pure bull.

Until white people are honest about the false anger they have unleashed, all we will do is re-create tragic cycles. The burnings came in the same time frame of the Million Man March, just as the bombing of the Birmingham church that killed four girls who were attending Sunday School came shortly after the 1963 March on Washington.

The Birmingham bombing came after 20 previous, unsolved bombings against African-Americans. Then, as now, federal agents started badly. Ministers of the burned churches said that their members have been interrogated far more heavily than white people, being embarassed at school and at work. The complaint was reminiscent of the FBI's fervor to prosecute civil rights activists while keeping hands off the racists.

That history is so unchanged that America has two crimes to solve, one of the burnings and one of the heart. The fires remind us that the African-American struggle for power can still spark a violent white response. When it takes 32 burnings to get a sympathetic white response, the upper orders can claim no less blood or embers on their hands than the common white people they inevitably will arrest.